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Great Another AI Post.
On the front page of Meddit today is a post that basically goes "AI convinced my patient that eating toilet paper helps with constipation." This to my experience appears to be the norm.
In Medicine I've found AI to be of limited utility, because mistakes are not allowed and the required error checking usually nullifies productivity gains.
In Programming it seems to be hot shit because error checking is part of the job and required either way.
Other fields things get more complicated and I have less experience. But the usual people seem excited and the usual people seem frustrated.
So I want to know, for those of you who use AI for work outside of programming (and not to simplify tasks for hobbies/personal life) what are you actually using it for, how is it helping your discipline? I am endlessly fascinated by the immense gap between people who love it and hate it.
Also, for those of you who know a bit more about LLMs, the lack of true error correction seems to be a fundamental problem, is their any hope of this actually being addressed without completely changing away from LLMs?
I am not sure that if rigorously tested on frontier models which are adequately tuned, that the error rate would be much lower than that of physicians. The difference between medicine and programming is that medicine is a guild which a strong lobby that makes it very hard to innovate. While programmers literally give away their work through things like open source. OpenAI has tried to probe this space (and claims that even going back to GPT-4 their models could beat physicians in some settings, look up "HealthBench") but other companies have not done so yet. Quite unfortunate, given that healthcare spending is about 10-20% of GDP in developed countries.
That Reddit post has literally been made by people whose salary partly depends on the belief that these tools are bad and error-prone, so it can be filed away under "vibes".
Apparently the biggest recent adopter has been law.
"True error correction" doesn't exist for human physicians either. Which is why you pay malpractice insurance.
If AI was able to write prescriptions for me, I would choose Astra over 95% of doctors.
I think whether the doctors like it or not, their patients (maybe not the geriatric ones, but often they have younger family helping) will be asking AI questions. I will admit to using it for "does this merit going to the doctor?" Sorts of questions, and for "recommend some PT exercises for this nagging issue" (seems a blurry line between sports medicine and personal trainer). I trust the doctors I see, but copays are high enough that I don't go for just any sniffle, and I don't want to pester them with questions outside of appointments.
From using it in other fields, I'd expect it to be good at transcribing verbal notes (I hear doctors hate charting, maybe it could do that interactively with the patient?), and at pulling obscure facts from the training data. I know pharmacists are currently supposed to be checking drug interactions, but adding an extra layer of verification there seems an easy addition. I'd expect it to be good at triage, but I'm not sure exactly what that would look like.
I would not expect mass layoffs in medicine as a result. Demand for medicine is very elastic, and if appointments were cheaper, we'd probably just have more of them. The limiting factor seems to be the 300 seconds you get with a physician, and how many hours they have in a day.
The problem is that patients do this now and it's a disaster and they don't realize it. Everyone who does outpatient medicine is flooded with instances of patients being sure about something and it being wildly off base, useless, and time consuming because the patient has been convinced of some nonsense that we have to walk back. I'm sure some fraction of people are saving themselves time or getting useful information but it's not well represented in what we actually see.
Part of this is because people don't realize that a lot of medical work involves things like dealing with an anxious patient who repeatedly asks the AI until they get the answer they want, assholes, and things like rationing care (which the AI has no facility with).
Believe it or not a lot of visits (especially to the ED) are pointless and we'd love it if people were successfully using AI for triage.
They aren't.
Yeah, I try to be very careful to avoid confirmation bias, and only for relatively minor things. I have to do that fairly frequently with LLMs in other contexts, so it's not an unfamiliar skill to me. A couple extra strength exercises (which make sense to me given my knowledge of the anatomy) isn't likely to hurt anything.
But I doubt most patients are avoiding it. Frankly, I'm probably not completely either.
Yeah that's fair, we definitely have many posters here who would use a tool like that and be sensible about.
We also have even more people who would do similar stuff and be intensely foolish, and have no awareness of that fact.
Unfortunately the productivity gains from the former are probably outweighed by the damages from the latter.
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